When asked which teacher I had has changed my life? I would say Ms. Kleiman, a pre-calculus teacher at Wilson High School. This answer does not come immediately. It arrived after a subtle process of elimination, as well as reminiscing the worse and bad times in classrooms that help shaped with my perception of good teacher.

Is the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), really the best indicator of college success? I propose that college acheivment can be measured by success in the classroom itself. It seems unfair that a test can dictate your future and intimidate students who are deciding to apply to schools. Student’s, who are intelligent, but not savvy to the SAT, are getting left behind.

"If you work hard, you can achieve anything." Prestigious universities like the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of California, Berkeley all instill the idea of hard work in high school students, so when I graduated from Woodrow Wilson Classical High School in Long Beach two years ago with a 4.2 GPA and a long resume of extra-curricular activities, I believed that I would get accepted to UC Berkeley, my dream school.

Two years ago, when I first attended Long Beach City College, I remember I was one of the newly high school graduates standing in line at the library, waiting nervously for my turn to take the assessment test—a test described by the counselors as ‘life changing’.

Growing up in the public school system, I witnessed my share of bullying. In a situation like this, you really do not know what to do. I was scared and I knew that if I told someone what I had seen, the bully would come after me.